The Robot Will See You Now
While 7.5 million of us live in rural or remote areas, a mere 1,500 of the country's medical specialists are there alongside.
Fresh air, clean water, proximity to nature, the complete absence of rush hour—there is much to be said for country living. Unfortunately, access to acute and specialist medical care doesn’t often make the list of benefits. Especially in Canada: while 7.5 million of us live in rural or remote areas, a mere 1,500 of the country’s medical specialists—surgeons, cardiologists, oncologists, and the like—are there alongside.
Researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto believe they’ve found a solution. Over the past several years, a team of doctors and medical technologists have been developing a novel method of delivering specialist care to remote communities: use a robot to do it. Instead of forcing the patient to travel to an urban medical centre (which can amplify the trauma) or waiting for a specialist to fly in (time that could lead to irreversible damage), this new technology uses a secure link to connect a medical specialist with a robot to perform procedures in the communities where patients actually live.
The team has already performed several remote brain angiograms—a diagnostic brain scan during which an ultra-thin, camera-fitted catheter is inserted into blood vessels and navigated using a purpose-built surgical robot. For stroke patients in rural communities, such procedures are a revolution. When treating an oxygen-starved brain, every minute counts, and the ability to bring a patient to a nearby hospital and discover blockages, assess narrowing, or see the effect of an aneurysm right here, right now could mean the difference between long-lasting damage and long-term recovery.
Thus far, the remoteness of such surgeries hasn’t been all that remote: the St. Michael’s team first successfully tested the technology from across the operating room, then from a different operating room altogether, and then between two cross-town hospitals. But the proof-of-concept has been established. Next up is a surgery to remove blood clots for a patient located in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario—some 700 kilometres away.
Such innovations are obviously good news for long-suffering remote and rural patients. But they are also good news for remote and rural communities themselves. If robots and fibre-optic connections can eliminate the distance between patients and caregivers, people have more reason to raise families, build lives, and develop thriving communities in the farthest reaches of our country. As those spaces become ever more contentious in our fractured world, that could make all the difference to our health—as well as our politics, economy, and sovereignty.
